Time Explained

[colubridae]

...I find it odd that you do not want to help people understand your position. You seem to show all the same behavior that you decry in those who shill against global warming...

I'm perfectly happy to assist genuine posters. However I'm not prepared to "assist" somebody who refuses to discuss the topic and instead throws out snide insinuations and ad-hominems comparing me with a "shill" and dismissing the explanations I do give as "make no sense".

No you don't...


You used this ridiculous maths to demonstrate your assertion…

And we know already that a velocity is a distance divided by a time. So if a period is a wavelength divided by a velocity, that means a period is a distance divided by a distance divided by a time. So let’s do some simple mathematics. Let’s work it through. We can combine T = λ / v and v = λ / t and write it down as:

T = λ / ( λ / t)

Then we can cancel out the λs to get:

T = 1/(1/t)

Then we cancel the double reciprocal to leave:

T = t

The answer we get is T = t. A period of time is a period of time. This mathematical definition of time is circular. The mathematics tells us nothing about its base terms. So what is its true nature? How do we dig down and get to the bottom of it?

When I used your same stupid ‘proof’ technique:-

Also since we now know that T = t

We can now substitute in our original equation [1]

Giving
T = λ / ( λ / T)



Again cancelling Ts gives


1 = λ / ( λ / 1)


Gives

1 = λ / λ

Multiplying both sides by λ gives

λ = λ


The answer we get is λ = λ . A length of space is a length of space. This mathematical definition of space is also circular. The mathematics tells us nothing about its base terms. So what is its true nature? How do we dig down and get to the bottom of it?


Fuck me genius at work.

You failed to use your ‘maths’ to demonstrate where I was incorrect but you were correct, using identical methods.

If your technique is correct and mine isn’t show me where.

Your maths demonstrated ‘no time’, so why didn’t mine demonstrate ‘no space’?

[Trolldor]

T = λ / ( λ / t)

Since when did Half-life enter the equation?

[ChildInAZoo]

...I find it odd that you do not want to help people understand your position. You seem to show all the same behavior that you decry in those who shill against global warming...

I'm perfectly happy to assist genuine posters. However I'm not prepared to "assist" somebody who refuses to discuss the topic and instead throws out snide insinuations and ad-hominems comparing me with a "shill" and dismissing the explanations I do give as "make no sense".

I have not refused to discuss your position. I have asked, repeatedly, for a clearer presentation of your position so that I might discuss it. The comparison to a shill was your own comparison: you are doing the same things that you decried in another thread. I am only trying to apply the standards that you listed and I assumed that you would actually want to avoid those criteria. Perhaps you are confusing me with another poster here, for there is nothing snide going on and I seem to have been the poster most open to your ideas.

I actually want to see your assumptions and the logic that proceeds from them. As it stands now, your presentation is simply confusing and your repeated contradictory claims, especially the ones about rigor, are not assisting your communication.

[mistermack]

"Since 1967, the second has been defined to be the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K (absolute zero), and with appropriate corrections for gravitational time dilation."

Can someone tell me what 'at rest' means? Edit: I'm assuming that it means at rest in the chosen referenceframe, so the length of a second is only valid for that frame of reference?
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[colubridae]

T = λ / ( λ / t)

Since when did Half-life enter the equation?

Half-life. Posting on this thread means I need a life.

[mistermack]

Having read a bit more of the posts on this, as far as I can see Farsight is just stating exactly what I thought time was, a property of energy.
By all the anti posts, it appears that people believe this to be wrong. So how come nobody has explained what time ACTUALLY IS? Surely if you disagree with his claims, you can enlighten me?
I'd be interested to know where I've been going wrong.
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[Brain Man]

I think i need to read your work again.

Like I said, time exists like heat exists. I didn't say it doesn't exist, just that it isn't what most people think it is.

you might like this guy he writes papers basically seeming to conclude with your position:

http://www.vetrnica.net/index.php?optio ... &Itemid=23

Yes, I know Amrit Srecko Sorli. We don't agree on everything, but we do agree on time and motion. He's in Slovenia, and I gave him some assistance with the colloquial English in a paper he wrote last year.

This is completely mental... there is no arrow of time, all there is is space. The time is an effect of motion or spin which is a self referred relationship we construct into a linear narrative ?

All there is, is space and motion through it. That's what's there. Things move, processes occur. The arrow of time is a construct. It doesn't really point in a direction. What's mental is time travel. People say things like "we travel forward in time at one second per second", but we don't travel at all. Time travel is science fiction. Ever heard of a stasis box? It's science-fiction too, but it's useful to demonstrate something: get in the box, and the "stasis field" prevents all motion, even at the atomic level. So you can't move, your heart doesn't beat, and you can't even think. When I open the box five hundred years later, to you it's like I opened the box as soon as you got in. You "travelled" to the future by not moving at all. Instead everything else did. And all that motion, be it the motion of planets or people or atoms or light, is through space.

I feel a little dizzy here. So there is no time, then the idea of mapping out a linear sequence of events i.e. The expanding universe is out the window.

No, not at all. There is time, we do map out a sequence of events, the universe does expand. But it's all based on motion through space. The "motion through time" is just a figure of speech.

Maybe not so, what you are saying is the expanding universe, is operating in space and is real, but time is just a means we have devised using periodic references to quantize the space itself.

To quantize the motion through space. No motion means no time. There's no light moving so you can't see, there's no signals moving between your brain cells or within your brain cells so you can't think. Stop the clock or freeze the frame and you actually stop motion.

So really the main point in what you are saying is that time is not a fourth dimension at all as physics teaches us. We just have X,Y,Z which we choose to express with periodicity and scales?

No, all the maths of Minkowski spacetime still works. Time is a dimension, but a dimension in the old sense of measure, rather than a dimension that offers freedom of motion. You use it to to plot the cumulative motion occuring throughout the universe in the X Y and Z spatial dimensions. But there is no motion through it.

What a weird co-incidence, i was pointing out some problems to Amrit on a paper he hotlinked (on time and the brain) in facebook last week, then thought i need to track down John duffield and get a full grip of his take on time. I do get the impression it really is a small club working on original stuff these days.

Sorry to press you on this, but basically would it be right to say that its periodicity that we are using as the main marker to create our sense of time..i.e. Even if we aren't using periodicity, we still take a reference of some kind and then basically keep repeating it ?

Or how would you describe the process that humans go through to assign time ?

Also why does time need to be a dimension at all then ?
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[LaMont Cranston]

Mr Jobby, The process that, we, as human beings, go through is called life. As perceivers, time is a way that we use to measure experience, and, for us, time undenialy exists. We can know that's true because we and others like us experience aging.

As citizens who live on the planet Earth, we think of time in terms of 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 24 hours to a day, 365 days to a year and so on. Hey, that's way of keeping track, but it's Earth-bound. If we lived somewhere else in the cosmos, those numbers, most likely, would be totally meaningless, but we still would experience aging.

From the perspective of what is going on in the cosmos, it is all happening right now. We can use our concept of time to attempt to re-construct what happened in the past, but we are still doing it in present time. As far as the future goes, we also experience it from here and now. By definition, the future is what has not happened yet.

See you real soon...in human time that is...

[lpetrich]

Let’s move on to sound. Imagine a super-evolved alien bat with a large number of ears, like a fly’s eye. This bat would “see” using sound, and if it was sufficiently advanced it might even see in colour. But we know that sound is pressure waves, and when we look beyond this at the air molecules, we know that sound relies on motion.

I will concede that, though I fail to see how your examples support some would-be Grand Unified Theory based on classical mechanics.

You can also feel heat. Touch that stove and you feel that heat. We talk about heat exchangers and heat flow as if there’s some magical mysterious fluid in there. And yet we know there isn’t. We know that heat is another derived effect of motion.

However, that's atom-scale random motion.

Taste is chemical in nature, and somewhat primitive. Most of your sense of taste is in fact your sense of smell. Do you know how smell works? Look up olfaction and you’ll learn about molecular shape. But the latest theory from a man called Luca Turin says it’s all down to molecular vibration, because isomers smell the same. That’s motion again.

That's demonstrably false. Chirality (chemistry) - Wikipedia There are several substances whose mirror-image variations have different smells and tastes. That agrees with the lock-and-key chemical-receptor theory and not with the molecular-vibrational-mode theory. Furthermore, large molecules have large numbers of vibrational modes that approximate a continuous distribution. Those modes likely also have rather broad resonance widths due to the molecules being surrounded with water. One can see something similar in the infrared and visible-light spectra of condensed materials; their spectral lines, to the extent that they can be said to exist, are usually very broad.

One can easily work out this effect for a vibrating chain.

Back to smell.

The human olfactory receptor gene family — PNAS
The mouse olfactory receptor gene family — PNAS
BioMed Central | Full text | Genetic diversity of canine olfactory receptors

Human: "339 intact OR genes and 297 OR pseudogenes"
Mouse: ~1000
Dog: ~800

Since our recent ancestors have been less smell-dependent than those of mice and dogs, it's not surprising that we have fewer functional types of smell receptors than they do.

[Brain Man]

Mr Jobby, The process that, we, as human beings, go through is called life. As perceivers, time is a way that we use to measure experience, and, for us, time undenialy exists. We can know that's true because we and others like us experience aging.

As citizens who live on the planet Earth, we think of time in terms of 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 24 hours to a day, 365 days to a year and so on. Hey, that's way of keeping track, but it's Earth-bound. If we lived somewhere else in the cosmos, those numbers, most likely, would be totally meaningless, but we still would experience aging.

From the perspective of what is going on in the cosmos, it is all happening right now. We can use our concept of time to attempt to re-construct what happened in the past, but we are still doing it in present time. As far as the future goes, we also experience it from here and now. By definition, the future is what has not happened yet.

See you real soon...in human time that is...

I am still having problems getting my head round it..but i suppose its ok if we just think of time as a measure of motion in space.. So the rings on trees, the layers which build up in rocks putting years on our planet, are descriptions of motion that did take a long "time"..by our standards.

still dont see how time is a dimension though

[ChildInAZoo]

still dont see how time is a dimension though

When we identify an event, we distinguish not simply where the event took place, but we identify when it took place. That on its own should be enough to show that we have a need to identify time as a dimension.

In order to be as precise as possible in physics we have no choice but to treat time geometrically. The specifics of physics require that we use very specific restrictions on geometry when we treat time as a dimension.

[Brain Man]

still dont see how time is a dimension though

When we identify an event, we distinguish not simply where the event took place, but we identify when it took place. That on its own should be enough to show that we have a need to identify time as a dimension.

In order to be as precise as possible in physics we have no choice but to treat time geometrically. The specifics of physics require that we use very specific restrictions on geometry when we treat time as a dimension.

So what do you think about all this. Do you think time is as irrelevant to fundamental physics as farsight proposes ?

If the effect of gravity acting over thousands of millions of years in planetary bodies can build up a real and local arrow showing a progression of structural accumulation within say a planet itself, such as layering of elements on its surface or wherever.., or even the structure of galaxies...accumulating mass over time. Then surely this makes time as real as it gets. As the evidence for the sequence of events might exist on every planet or galaxy in the universe.

How can time be considered not fundamental then if its part of the structure of the universe, not in our minds, but in the accumulation and structuring of most of the matter thats out there ?

(excuse lack of correct terms, astronomy not my strong point)

[ChildInAZoo]

So what do you think about all this. Do you think time is as irrelevant to fundamental physics as farsight proposes ?

As I've said, I'm not sure what Farsight proposes. However, since it is impossible to do physics without identifying time in some way and since we cannot do physics accurately without spending care and attention to detail in the way that we treat time, I am content with rejecting the claim that time is irrelevant to physics.

Much of contemporary physics does attempt to provide a mathematical background in which there is a manifold that can be used to mathematically describe the relationship between events, including the evolution of a system, where there is no time coordinate given beforehand. However, in order to be used in application, some time coordinate must be used and thus the temporal innocence of that manifold must be abandoned. (I hope that "temporal innocence" is an acceptable metaphor.)

If the effect of gravity acting over thousands of millions of years in planetary bodies can build up a real and local arrow showing a progression of structural accumulation within say a planet itself, such as layering of elements on its surface or wherever.., or even the structure of galaxies...accumulating mass over time. Then surely this makes time as real as it gets. As the evidence for the sequence of events might exist on every planet or galaxy in the universe.

How can time be considered not fundamental then if its part of the structure of the universe, not in our minds, but in the accumulation and structuring of most of the matter thats out there ?

I think I agree with you here: we use time to describe pretty much everything and every physical process. If these things are not simply evolving in time, then we need some similarly sweeping explanation as to why all these physical processes are behaving similarly.

(excuse lack of correct terms, astronomy not my strong point)

Given what you;ve been saying, you're doing fine.

[Brain Man]

So what do you think about all this. Do you think time is as irrelevant to fundamental physics as farsight proposes ?

As I've said, I'm not sure what Farsight proposes. However, since it is impossible to do physics without identifying time in some way and since we cannot do physics accurately without spending care and attention to detail in the way that we treat time, I am content with rejecting the claim that time is irrelevant to physics.

Much of contemporary physics does attempt to provide a mathematical background in which there is a manifold that can be used to mathematically describe the relationship between events, including the evolution of a system, where there is no time coordinate given beforehand. However, in order to be used in application, some time coordinate must be used and thus the temporal innocence of that manifold must be abandoned. (I hope that "temporal innocence" is an acceptable metaphor.)

If the effect of gravity acting over thousands of millions of years in planetary bodies can build up a real and local arrow showing a progression of structural accumulation within say a planet itself, such as layering of elements on its surface or wherever.., or even the structure of galaxies...accumulating mass over time. Then surely this makes time as real as it gets. As the evidence for the sequence of events might exist on every planet or galaxy in the universe.

How can time be considered not fundamental then if its part of the structure of the universe, not in our minds, but in the accumulation and structuring of most of the matter thats out there ?

I think I agree with you here: we use time to describe pretty much everything and every physical process. If these things are not simply evolving in time, then we need some similarly sweeping explanation as to why all these physical processes are behaving similarly.

(excuse lack of correct terms, astronomy not my strong point)

Given what you;ve been saying, you're doing fine.

Actually i recall what Julian Arbour an expert on this subject said that agrees with this. That time is an internal and localised self reference at different places or scales in the universe.

I am paraphrasing or even taking liberties now..There may be intrinsic properties of time that are universal, such as the stop/start nature which gives it definition and its single vector. I was even talking to another scientist today who proposes that time measurements are different at the north and south poles of a magnetic dipole. That time dilation may occur (relatively speaking) to virtual photons at the south pole in relation to those at the north.

So time might have an analogy to human language in the way that language has broadly similar properties and functions, but only construct themselves to their own locality ?


I am just feeling around here..Time to dig out the Julian Arbour article I think.

[LaMont Cranston]

MrJobby, I am also very interested in this subject, and I don't claim to be an expert. I'm more of an enthusiastic seeker of knowledge.

It appears to me that time may exist, for us, as both a subjective and objective thing. We create our perception of time by having experiences. When you write "Time is an internal and localised self-reference," it sounds like that's what you're talking about. Does the past exist outside of our subjective experience?
For us, as perceivers, the past has already happened; it exists in the form of memories. We can look at what exists in present tim and attempt to "connect the dots" to put together what has happened since the Big Bang, since Jesus came on the scene, since Darwin, Einstein, whatever, but we are still doing it from here and now and considering what happened there and then.

Does time exist outside of our subjective experience? I'm more than willing to believe that's true, but, if it is true, how do we define and describe the characteristics of time other than it exists in a context that includes space, the two go together. In a way, this reminds me of trying to understand something like gravity. We know something called gravity exists because at least some of its attributes can be demonstrated in the real world, but do we understand gravity? Not yet...